Tornado Cash Developer Will Finally Be Released From Jai; zkSync Era Surges Ahead Of Polygon’s zkEVM As It Onboards This DeFi Protocol; CryptoPunks NFT in Centre Pompidou ‘Quite a Surprise’

Lemon, a crypto wallet based in Argentina, has chosen to extend its partnership with Polygon to make on-chain solutions accessible to its more than 1.8 million users in LATAM. The news was shared by Lemon through an official blog post, with highlights shared by Polygon on its Twitter account.

Former US President Donald Trump's second set of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Trump Digital Trading Cards Series 2, sold out within 24 hours since launch, generating over $2.7 million in secondary sales and having 7,394 owners.

According to a report by Alchemy, Ethereum layer 2s, such as Optimism, Arbitrum, and Polygon, saw an increase in popularity in Q1 2023. Users bridged over $635,000 worth of crypto assets to these networks in the first quarter, an increase of 44% over Q4 2022 and 518% over Q1 2022. The deployment of smart contracts related to layer 2s also increased by 160% when compared to Q1 2022, despite a 30% decrease relative to Q4 2022.

Despite the crypto winter that has unfolded over the past few months, Web3 developers remain resilient in their efforts to deploy decentralized applications (dapps), according to the Q1 2023 Developer Report from Web3 developer backend Alchemy. Developers installed an average of 1.9 million Ethereum SDKs per week, a 47% increase year-over-year, and 788% more wallet SDKs were deployed since Q1 of 2022.

HedgeUp (HDUP) is a new cryptocurrency project that has attracted the attention of Stacks (STX) and Polygon (MATIC) holders. The project aims to provide a decentralized platform for trading derivatives, such as options and futures. 

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have become one of the hottest trends in the cryptocurrency world.

After a surge of user activity in March of 2023, Polygon has become the second-largest blockchain gaming network. According to a report from DappRadar, a total of 138,081 unique active wallets (UAWs) became involved in gaming in the Polygon chain.

Polygon (MATIC), a Layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, has been a popular choice for developers due to its fast and cheap transactions. However, its future may be in jeopardy as Ethereum transitions to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which is expected to significantly reduce gas fees and increase transaction speeds. This has led experts to consider RenQ Finance (RENQ) as a potential replacement for Polygon. RenQ Finance is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. What sets RenQ Finance apart from other DeFi projects is its modular and composable architecture, which makes it easier to integrate with other DeFi projects.

<b>Cointime News:&nbsp; </b>The “Coming ZK Era: Brand New Possibilities For NFT &amp; GameFi” brunch event was successfully held in Hong Kong, organized by zkMeta and Polygon, and co-sponsored by Aliyun, Particle Network, and O3 Swap. The event drew a lot of attention from institutions and builders working with GameFi, cross-chain, NFT, and ZK technologies. Discussions revolved around topics such as new business models for on-chain game infrastructure, NFT &amp; GameFi using the new ZK infrastructure, current pain points, opportunities, and challenges of public chains, as well as providing new development ideas for Web3 game developers and teams.

London-based fintech Helio has raised $3.3M in a seed funding round led by Peak and Lightspeed Faction, with participation from RockawayX, Solana Labs, and angel investors. The company's Web3 payments platform enables merchants, dApps, and creators to accept instant crypto payments across multiple blockchains, including Solana, Polygon, and Ethereum.

The wallet allows users to seamlessly swap on Mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism and discover top tokens by market cap, price charts, and volume.

Mastercard has announced a new artist accelerator program that is non-fungible token (NFT)-gated and only accessible to holders of its Mastercard Music Pass NFT. The limited-edition NFT is free until the end of the month and was created in collaboration with Polygon, offering free access to educational materials, unique AI tools, and other experiences. The program was designed to help users better understand and trust how blockchain and digital assets are used, and to connect people and build communities around shared universal passions. Mastercard has been a long-time supporter and early adopter of Web3 technologies and has already selected five artists from different genres globally to participate in the program. This development comes less than two months after both Mastercard and Visa announced that they would be delaying all new crypto and blockchain partnerships until improved market conditions and a more established regulatory framework.

By combining the services of cross-chain bridge Multichain and SWFT, BitKeep now facilitates cross-chain trading between zkSync Era and other blockchains, such as Ethereum, BNB Chain, TRON, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism.

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) have the potential to enable scalable and private payments as well as smart contract platforms.

Reddit has launched its third-generation NFT collection on Polygon, this time featuring over 100 artists and using the theme of future realities. Artists were given freedom to create avatars within the Snoo template frame.

According to DappRadar DeFi Apps, BitKeep Swap has secured the top spot with 330,540 unique active wallets (UAW) in the past 30 days, resulting in an impressive growth rate of 436%. This achievement is attributed to the growth of the user base on Arbitrum and Polygon. In the past 30 days, the number of BitKeep Swap users has risen by 5659.3% on Arbitrum and 47.23% on Polygon.

Fire is a free extension that simulates web3 transactions, a startup focused on making web3 safer and simpler, has raised $3.5 million in funding from Atomic.

Binance's BNB chain has surpassed Ethereum and Polygon in terms of daily active users, with over 1 million daily active users. The BNB chain has also onboarded 274 million unique users at an average month-on-month rate of 6% over the past year, while Ethereum's rate has declined by an average of 5%.